The Best Way to Learn is to be Thrown into the Deep End

As a young boy I loved swimming – as can be seen from the feature photo from this blog! The warm Limpopo farm weather made it most pleasant!

In the late 70’s very few people had swimming pools and fewer could swim – as told by the hilarious Leon Schuster song “Swem Jannie Swem”. One of my favorites at the time :-).

Today I can see the clear trend of parents serious about having their kids able to swim.

An important skill considering the number of pools around and swimming hero’s like Natalie du Toit, Penny Heyns, Ryk Neethling, Chad le Clos and Roland Schoeman.

Never did I think that I’ll be part of a team that serves this industry by creating swimming school management and accounting software to help solve their admin headaches.

Swimming schools made an early introduction to #TheAdminOnlineStory. As part of designing AdminOnline I interviewed swimming school admin staff and owners.

It was intriguing to understand the administration and management challenges that face such businesses.

The sheer volume of swimmers adds greatly to the burden.

It was with this in mind that we created many of the features to automate and ease the burden.

Like the personalized online account registration form for parents to self register. We added this to help save time but also to improve the quality of your data through enforcing certain questions to be answered and information to be supplied.

We saw that something as basic as invoicing all the swimmers correctly and ON TIME according to the specific set of services was and is a major issue.

Communicating the amount still owed and recording payments add to the issue list.

To a large degree, it is the large volumes of swimmers and the lack of structured data that adds to the issue.

We focused on addressing this problem and also addressing needs like setting a competency level, manage your class list and also marking attendance to help remind some parents that their child did actually attend the class 🙂

For us, being faced with so many real business challenges from our initial customers was like being thrown into the deep end.

At the end of the day, we want to serve the swimming school and swimming academy businesses and find great pleasure in swimming with you.